How to get a Twitter feed in Google Reader Friday, January 09, 2009

Image representing Google Reader as depicted i...Image via CrunchBaseIf you happen to use Google Reader and have ever tried to add your twitter feed you'll know that they are incompatible. This is apparently because Google Reader doesn't support the authentication Twitter requires.

After wasting some time trying to use Yahoo Pipes as a conduit which was one solution thrown up on a web search, I finally thought I would try Feedburner which is the service that provides a RSS feed of this blog.

It was surprisingly easy and worked first time. Here's how.
  1. At the bottom of your Twitter home page on the left hand side, you'll see a box marked "RSS". Copy the associated link location by right clicking on the box and selecting to copy link location.
  2. Setup/Login into your Feedburner account
  3. Within Feedburner, go to "My Feeds", which is accessed at the top of the screen, and paste the Twitter link you copied into the field under the heading "Burn a feed right this instant".
  4. The link you copied in is password protected and so you now need to add your twitter username and password into the link as follows
    http://username:password@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/nnnnnnn.rss

    where "n" at the suffix represents the numbers of your unique feed.
  5. Click the "Next" button adjacent to the Feedburner field you've entered the link into
  6. On the subsequent Feedburner page you can modify the resultant feed title and link if you wish to
  7. Click on the button marked "Activate Link". This makes your feed live and provides you with a feed url which you should copy.
  8. Back in Google Reader, add a subscription and paste in the feed url.
And that's it.

Given that Twitter no longer provides a feed via IM clients, you may find this an easy way to keep on top of your Twitter updates.
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posted by John Wilson @ 12:49 PM Permanent Link ,

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LinkedIn News feed - blessing or curse? Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Image representing LinkedIn as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase, source unknown LinkedIn provide a news feed on people in your network, highlighting new connections they've made, their status updates and reporting on any profile changes. This can be received via RSS, which is how I receive regular updates.

However, for users of LinkedIn, the decision to make information available to your network is an all or nothing setting as shown below

Publish profile updates and recommendations?

When you update your status, LinkedIn can automatically notify your connections.

Notify your connections of status updates? In many cases, I suspect LinkedIn users don't even realise this setting exists. Yet simply because of who they are connecting, people may be revealing more about themselves than they realise. For example, by virtue of connections made, business dealings may be inadvertantly revealed e.g. group of new connections with a particular company. Likewise, anyone looking for a job is likely to speak to recruitment agents and may well connect to them. However, the by-product of this is that anyone in your network will start to see a pattern emerging and conclude you are looking for a new job. This was highlighted to me recently when I saw that one of my connections, who is the Head of IT at Schroders, appeared to be connecting to his whole department and I cynically thought what I great way it was to see if any of his staff were hooking up with agents.

Of course, it's easy to switch this off, but then you [and your network connections] also lose the benefits that this information byproduct highlights e.g. common connections or announcements you make. In my case, I have contacted connections on many occasions having seen they've moved jobs or linked to someone I too know. Likewise, I have been contacted off the back of recent connections I've made.

As such, perhaps a "Disclose/Not Disclose" setting is needed whenever issuing/accepting an invite which can be defaulted to the universal setting and overridden when desired.
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RSS service Newsalloy on the brink of closure Friday, May 02, 2008

Google ReaderImage via WikipediaWow, the May spring clean must be in full swing as I've just received an email from Newsalloy advising that it too is to close.

You received this email because you are registered user of News Alloy Project - Web2.0 based Feed Reader. (http://www.newsalloy.com/)

Bad times finally came, my contract with our hosting provider is over so i will shut down the site in a couple of days, please grab your OPML for your convenience.

Future plans:

If you are interested for project to stay alive and get it under your wing please contact me, we need new dedicated hosting (quite powerful).

 In case you want to get full ownership of the domain and grab all sources feel free to ask. It will cost not that much as fat cats are asking.

Also i've developed new version about 6 months ago which is half ready - News Alloy 2.0.
It looks much brighter, faster, pure Javascript UI, rich featured and impressive look and feel.

But to make it complete i need funding. Thats for sure.
If You want to have look - please let me know to get an invitation.

If noone is interested i will put other project on the top of News Alloy domain.

Please keep in mind that News Alloy project was developed by one single person who was in charge of everything - coding, design, promo and PR.

Now I'm open for interesting contracts and custom jobs in the area of web development and system administration.


Thank you for staying with us,
Volodymyr Danylyuk,
Project Developer and Maintainer

http://www.lordtime.com/
http://www.newsalloy.com/
Skype: v_danylyuk
E-mail: lt@lordtime.com


I'm sad to see this service close as it was the first online RSS reader I used and found it far superior to many others. Unfortunately, its' occasional outages prompted me to move to Google Reader, and from the site stats it looks like many others deserted the service. It never gained traction against more established services and was possibly doomed once Google introduced their reader.

Service Stats at 2 May 2008
Users online:10
Users registered:10977
Users active:280
Feeds subscribed:7160


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LinkedIn - RSS feeds and more Wednesday, April 02, 2008

LinkedIn recently added a number of new features which I'm quite thankful for.

When they recently added a Facebook style "river of news" feature for network updates, it was very information but either you had to log in regularly to inspect updates or they passed you by. The subsequent RSS feed addition has removed the hit/miss nature of seeing updates. For instance, it alerted me to several people having moved jobs that I may otherwise have missed and allowed me to drop a "congrats" note to renew the acquaintance/conversation.

The network updates feature has also slipped in alerts when someone joins LinkedIn who is a contacts you've previously imported but not connected to. Given that I choose to connect only to existing LinkedIn users, rather than trying to invite/recruit new members to the service, these are a convenient prompt.

One feature that was introduced but I'm convinced isn't working or if it is, then it's only on a weekly update cycle is the Profiles View box. The purported statistics on how often your own profile has been viewed or featured in searches rarely changes e.g. mine said 57 views in last 5 days and 432 times in searches for 10 days running. No matter.

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InfoNgen - Financial news discovery Thursday, March 27, 2008

Over the last two years I've come across a handful of online services/applications that have sought to scour the web and discover articles/blog posts related to brands and companies. At first glance, Google Alerts provides a similar sort of function, but these offerings have sought to enhance their value in several ways
This news discovery/monitoring/detection capability, with output filtered for relevance to the user, addresses a blind-side that many companies had which entailed reliance on only a few trusted sources of mainstream media.

Most of the entrants into this field have targeted their offering towards financial services users, appreciating that this community attaches a high value to fast and reliable information discovery. As such, the potential revenue returns are high and the target market well defined for their sales efforts. I've previously commented on some of them - Market Clusters, Relegence and Monitor110.

At the simpler end, some of these appear to be glorified RSS readers but where content is filtered by keyword relevance. Some of these tools also provide stats on numbers of mentions, broken down by source type i.e. blog, online newspaper, company annoucement and may toss in trend information akin to Google Reader trends.

At the higher end, several of these have attempted to infer positive/negative sentiment in the sources, which is incredibly difficult to do but natural language technological advances supposedly enable good approximations to sentiment to be drawn from the text. As such, by aggregating the "information" about whether there is a positive/negative sentiment trend, perhaps weighted by the importance of the source e.g. my blog scoring a low weight and the Financial Times scoring a high weight, it is hoped to detect changes in market attitude.

Another one I recently came across is InfoNgen, which I would classify as being at the simpler end of the spectrum, but useful nonetheless, particularly for firms dipping their toe-in-the-water. Unusually they have a free version alongside their premium editions, but which gives you a flavour of its usefulness. Worth inspecting.

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AideRSS - not aiding my RSS reading Monday, October 01, 2007

Hmmmm. I so wanted AideRSS to work well for me and it looked promising so perhaps I've failed to configure it correctly but using the generated personalised feed it provides within Google Reader and
- the posts served up don't tell me who the author is, without looking at the links
- there's no mechanism to report which feeds/posts you like and dislike from within the RSS reader
- feeds that would appear in full are only providing headings in some instances
- within AideRSS site itself, I only seem to be able to rank feeds, rather than provide feedback on the posts

Am I missing something here? Welcome any guidance or suggestions

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The next iteration of RSS Readers Sunday, September 30, 2007

Like huge numbers of people, I switched to Google Reader and it'll have to be a killer app to get me to switch. That doesn't stop me from looking though, particularly if that app can both help with the prioritisation of posts; let me unhook from "dull" feeds easily; discover interesting new feeds or posts that it detects I may find interesting or which friends/colleagues use.

There are a few such apps around.

One recommended by Read/Write web is FeedEachOther covered here. They highlight some key features
Another option is AideRSS, which claims that it uses PostRank to score, filter and track performance of RSS feeds, thereby improving your efficiency.

I'm also trying out FeedHub at the moment albeit this may take some time before it evidences its worth, as it needs "learning time" to uncover what does and doesn't interest you. This one creates a feed that can be incorporate within Google Reader or any other RSS reader, only linking back when you want to give it a "thumbs down" on particular content it serves up.


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Get an RSS feed for any web page you visit Tuesday, September 04, 2007

I've become accustomed to using RSS as an efficient way of keeping up with changes on web sites, but some sites simply don't offer RSS (for whatever reason). So I was delighted to find Feedity, a free service which claims to be able to create RSS for any web page.

You visit the Feedity site, enter the web address of the site you want to create a feed for and it generates a feed that you can incorporate into an RSS reader. And if you want to, Feedity also provides for a quick and simple way to build a data mashup "pipeline" using Yahoo Pipes.

Overall, it works well - few minor hitches with some web pages but worth trying nonetheless.

However, you obviously shouldn't use this in a mission critical environment - there are no guarantees re timeliness, uptime or the like.

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Blogs hit share prices - who can save us? Saturday, May 19, 2007

Whilst gossip, rumour and speculation are constantly features of markets, each with the ability to directly move share prices, this week was possibly the first significant share price move attributed to a blog post. The stock in question was Apple Inc and it was temporarily hit by a report from Endgaget that the iPhone would ship late. This report was based on an email that originated from Apple's servers, but whose contents were subsequently shown to be false.

$4bn was wiped from Apple's market value and 60% of a normal day's trading volume in the stock was done in 30 minutes.


Much of the volume would have been a reaction to the share price slide and the volume going through i.e. copycat behaviour and not a result of the entire market seeing the post. However, it does raise three interesting points for me:

Blogs are now a source of breaking news. Some companies are making use of them to issue news and indeed the CEO of Sun recently proposed to the SEC that his blog should count as an official companies announcement source. In other cases, journalists and informed company observers are using blogs as their reporting media. Of course, some blogs are just trash! But it does mean that for investors, there is yet another source to monitor, but one that presents an immense challenge - unlike traditional media sources which were relatively few in number and hence easy to locate and monitor, blogs can spring up in minutes and without much fanfare. So this will play on an investor's fear that they may be missing out on relevant information which is in the public domain (as distinct from popular sources of information).

The second issue is the speed of the dissemination of such information. RSS offers the most efficient means of identifying, retrieving and collating new posts when they become available. However, RSS processing generally works on periodic background scans of nominated sources i.e. batch process, with the consequence that latency exists between publication and its discovery. In some cases, sources can "ping" to announce new information is available, reducing this latency. Yet as the Apple case shows, 30 minutes makes a considerable difference.

This presents a considerable challenge - we are now looking for technologies that can discover new sources (high performance google alerts) and instantly identify new posts. This means operates at speeds not traditionally associated with traditional RSS reader services. Firms like Alacra and Monitor 110 are making a stab at this space, are playing to the fear factors I've referred to above. Personally I feel each has some notable gaps in their offering.


This is going to be another arms race, not dissimilar to firms seeking to employ the fastest connectivity solutions to interact with execution venues i.e. the market. Yet the last factor is one of relevance and quality of content. It's fine to find the information fastest, but you still have to assess what it means, not to mention form a view as to whether it is reliable.

The Apple story will have awakened many eyes to this new frontier, most of whom will have no clue of what they are facing, let alone have any idea on how to attempt to solve it. They will all appreciate it is a money making opportunity!

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